prophet never swerved from his mission, and at last proselytes began flocking in to him, and he became the head of a powerful sect. Then came the fatal moment which turned his teaching from a blessing to Arabia into a curse for the world. When he grew powerful enough, he bade his sectaries to take up the sword, and impose Islam on their neighbours by the force of arms. His first success in the field, the battle of Bedr (624), was an encouragement to persevere in this evil path, and for the last eight years of his life he went forth, conquering and to conquer, among the tribes of Arabia, till he had built up a little theocratic empire in the peninsula (624-32). [Sidenote: Mohammed and his Religion.] Mohammed’s successes were won by unhallowed means, and the desire to extend them at almost any cost gradually led him into compromises with the habits and superstitions of his countrymen which were fatal to the purity of his religion. A strain of cunning, of revenge, of self-indulgence, appeared in a character which, in his years of poverty and trouble, had been blameless. He connived at the ancient fetich-worship of the Arabs, by conceding that the conical black stone of the Kaabah, which they had always worshipped, had been hallowed by Abraham, and should be the central shrine of his new faith. He fostered their vanity by proclaiming them the chosen people of God. He pandered to their craving for lust and bloodshed, by promising them the goods of their enemies to plunder in this life, and a heaven of gross sensual enjoyment in the next. He restricted, but he did not abolish, the evils of polygamy and slavery. In his day of triumph he consigned whole tribes and towns to death, sometimes under circumstances of treachery as well as of cruelty. Worst of all, he foisted into his revelation special mandates of God permitting himself to do things which his teaching forbade to his followers, such as to exceed his own limit of polygamy, and even to take his own foster-son’s bride to wife. It is hard to believe that he can have failed to see the horrible blasphemy involved in forging the name of God to special warrants approving his own lust. But this sin he repeatedly committed.